The Mirage: A Novel (31 page)

Now numbers, when you do reflect them in a mirror, you know what happens to most of them? They look different. You can still recognize them for what they are supposed to be, but they become strange, alien.

AL TALIB:
But not the number eight.

JOHNSON:
No, not number eight. You can turn it on its head, write it backwards or forwards, it stays the same.

AL TALIB:
Also zero. And one, if you write it with a single stroke.

JOHNSON:
Yes, but one is God’s number. And zero, you can guess who that belongs to. Eight, however, eight could be a man, or aspects of man.

AL TALIB:
And how do you interpret this dream, Mr. President?

JOHNSON:
Some things don’t change. The world could be turned upside down and still some things would remain exactly as they are. The Almighty Himself, of course. Good and evil. The creed of God’s disciples.

AL TALIB:
And the person of Lyndon Baines Johnson?

JOHNSON:
I am who I am.

AL TALIB:
And the transformation of the world, what is that an allusion to? The invasion of your country?

JOHNSON:
A week ago I would have answered yes. Now . . . Now I think my reversal of fortune is only a piece of a larger whole.

AL TALIB:
What is the larger whole?

JOHNSON:
You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. But it all makes sense now. I understand what I’m doing here. It’s about continuity.

AL TALIB:
Continuity, Mr. President?

JOHNSON:
God wanted to keep a Texan in charge. He upended everything else, but He still wanted that: a Texan, with something resembling a brain, to lead America in her darkest hour. And really, who else are you going to get to fill that role?

AL TALIB:
I don’t understand.

JOHNSON:
That’s all right, Mr. Al Talib. You will, in God’s own time. Peace be unto you, sir.

During the second refueling stop, in the Azores, some of the crew came off the plane to pray and Mustafa joined them. Afterwards he noticed something about the way they’d been facing, and realized that since leaving UAS airspace they’d crossed another invisible boundary. He spoke to one of the airmen, who confirmed that he was right.

“From here, the direction of the Qibla is eighty-six degrees, slightly north of east. It’s an effect of the earth’s curvature,” the airman added, used to dealing with civilian officials whose grasp of world geography was poor. “Mecca is closer to the equator, so on a flat map it looks as though you ought to pray facing southeast. But if you plot it on the surface of a globe, you see that the shortest distance to Mecca is actually a great-circle route, which—”

“I know what a great circle is,” Mustafa said gently, picturing a younger version of himself standing at the front of a classroom.

“The effect is more pronounced in America,” the airman said. “In Washington, the Qibla direction is fifty-six degrees. And should you continue on to the west coast of the continent, you’d be facing almost due north when you prayed. Of course the cannibals in the Rocky Mountains would probably eat you before you got that far . . .”

When they were airborne again, the pilot announced they’d be at Andrews Air Force Base in another five hours, around 9 p.m. local time. A flight attendant described the special landing procedure. To minimize the threat from ground-based missile attacks, the plane would stay above ten thousand feet until it was directly over the airfield, then spiral down quickly to the runway. “Especially in darkness, it may seem like we are out of control and about to crash, but God willing we’ll be fine, so please don’t panic.”

Mustafa had more reading to do but decided to rest his eyes for a few minutes first, and fell into an uneasy sleep that lasted for the rest of the flight. When the cargolifter began its terminal dive, he dreamed he started awake to find the plane packed with Americans. In the seat beside him a woman was reciting a rosary in terror, and when Mustafa stood up and looked about the now strangely enlarged passenger cabin, he saw other frightened faces—some praying, some crying, some whispering covertly into cell phones. None of these people seemed able to see him, but that could change in a heartbeat, and he did not think it would be healthy to become the focus of all that fear.

Struggling to keep his balance in the steeply angled aisle, he made his way to the front of the plane. Two Arab men in civilian dress stood guard outside the cockpit door, and with the certainty of dream Mustafa knew they were no more his allies than the Christians in the back. He passed ghostlike into the cockpit, where another Arab sat hunched over the controls.

They were very close to the ground. It was morning, not night, and Mustafa could clearly see the American capital across the river ahead. He also saw an airport off to the right, but they weren’t turning towards it. Instead they were headed straight for a large pentagonal building on the near side of the river. This was deliberate. The pilot had the plane under control and he was calm, smiling like a man on his way into paradise.

“Hey, moron!” Mustafa shouted at him. “You’re going to murder us all, what’s wrong with you?”

The pilot gave no answer, just dipped the nose of the plane a bit farther. Mustafa made a grab for the controls and woke for real aboard the cargolifter even as its wheels bumped the runway at Andrews.

Across the aisle, Amal let out a sigh of relief and then laughed. “Now that’s a landing!” she said. Samir, tearing at his armrests in the next row forward, added: “Already I hate this country.”

T
HE
L
IBRARY OF
A
LEXANDRIA

A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE

Green Zone

The
Green Zone
is a heavily fortified region of
Washington, D.C.
, that served as the headquarters of the
Coalition Provisional Authority
. It measures roughly 10 square kilometers and is surrounded by a blastproof concrete wall topped with electrified razor wire. Entry into the Zone is only possible via helicopter or through one of seven tightly controlled checkpoints.

The Green Zone includes the
National Mall
, a large open park space lined with monuments and government buildings that is claimed by some sources to have been the original inspiration for the Zone’s name. By 2004, however, with the
American insurgency
in full swing, “Green Zone” was understood to be a reference to the fact that this was an oasis of relative safety in an increasingly dangerous area. The rest of Washington—and America—became, by extension, “the Red Zone.”

In January 2009, control of the Green Zone passed from the Coalition Authority to the newly installed American government. Many of the Coalition troops have since withdrawn to bases outside Washington. However, a sizeable garrison of
UAS Marines
remains within the Zone to safeguard the
Arabian
,
Persian
, and
Kurdish embassies
, and to help American security forces defend against the continuing insurgent attacks.

NOTABLE SITES IN THE GREEN ZONE

·
The White House

·
The Capitol Building
(undergoing reconstruction)

·
The Washington Monument

·
The CSA Treasury Building

·
The Smithsonian Creation Science Museum

·
The Watergate Complex

M
ustafa woke again, from a dream of smokeless fire. He was lying on a four-poster bed with an embroidered canopy. Samir was a snoring lump on a second bed to his left, and to his right was a massive oak chest of drawers. A sign atop the chest, just legible in the faint glow of a nightlight, claimed that all three pieces of furniture were the onetime property of Pope Urban II. As for the room, it had originally been an office; looking between the bedposts Mustafa could see a windowed door, the words
ASSISTANT CURATOR
painted in reverse on the glass.

He sat up, remembering a helicopter ride from the airbase and a hasty meet-and-greet with a Marine Colonel Yunus who had been assigned to act as their host. Mustafa estimated he’d gotten to sleep between eleven and midnight. His watch now said 11:30, which, whether a.m. or p.m., seemed unlikely.

He got up and slipped out quietly. The hall outside the office brought him to a room painted with a mural of a deluge. Three of the walls showed only clouds and rain and wind-tossed waves; inset against the fourth was a scale model of an ark. A bearded white patriarch stood at the ark’s stern, gazing towards the center of the room, where a jagged pedestal like the tip of a drowning mountain jutted up from the blue carpet. The skeleton of a dinosaur with sickle-shaped claws on its hind feet was set on the pedestal, poised as if it were about to take a leap at the ark, but the placard at the pedestal’s base suggested it would not make it.
“Velociraptor antirrhopus,”
the placard read. “Extinct, 2349 B.C.”

A doorway in the wall opposite the ark led to a gallery containing the bones of many more of the Flood’s victims. The gallery had a skylight as well, and looking up Mustafa saw stars.

Wandering farther through the museum, he came upon Colonel Yunus in a room that looked like a tourism ad for Giza. “Good morning,” the colonel greeted him.

“So it is morning, then,” Mustafa said.

“Yes, about half past four. Were you able to sleep at all?”

“Some. The accommodations are quite comfortable.” Thinking of the velociraptor: “And unusual.”

The colonel smiled. “I don’t know how much you remember from our conversation last night, but this building really is a storehouse of wonders. During the initial occupation a large number of troops were housed here, in part to prevent looting. Now that the Americans have retaken control the museum is mostly unoccupied, but a few of us have been allowed to remain as unofficial caretakers until the new government has the money to reopen the place.”

“Thank you for sharing it with me.”

“You are welcome. I was just about to pray. Would you like to join me?”

“I would, thank you.”

“And your friend?”

“Samir is not observant, I’m afraid.”

“Ah. Well,” the colonel said, pointing, “there’s a washroom that way, and you’ll find some spare prayer rugs tucked behind Pharaoh’s palace.”

“You pray in here?”

“Sometimes, yes.” Smiling again: “I have a theory that a Muslim helped design this room. It turns out if you draw a straight line from the Sphinx to the part in the Red Sea over there, it corresponds almost exactly to the Qibla direction.”

“Interesting symbolism,” Mustafa said.

“Yes, there’s a lot of that in the Green Zone. It’s a weird place.”

Amal woke among lionesses.

At last night’s meeting with the colonel she’d been sufficiently alert to understand that Mustafa and Samir were being given VIP accommodations while she was being relegated to women’s quarters, which annoyed her until she realized which women she’d be bunking with.

The Women’s Combat Support Unit, aka the Lionesses, had been formed in 2007 as part of the broader counterinsurgency strategy known as the Surge. In addition to their reluctance to show gratitude, most Americans had a deep-seated cultural aversion to having their homes ransacked, but research had found that a feminine presence could help moderate this. Lionesses were assigned in pairs to accompany Marines on patrol in the Red Zone. When a house was searched for weapons or insurgents, it was the Lionesses who interviewed the occupants, preserving the honor of the women and keeping the men calm; they could often get answers where a male interrogator would be met by stony silence, or violence. The Red Zone being the Red Zone, violence did still sometimes occur, but as their nickname implied, Lionesses could also fight, and with a ferocity that took insurgents by surprise.

They lived along with the Marine garrison troops in the former residential and business complex adjacent to the Arabian embassy. Most of the male Marines occupied apartments in the Watergate East and South buildings; the Lionesses were housed on the top two floors of the Watergate Hotel, which had been turned into a high-security women’s dorm.

It was like college, but with more guns. Amal shared a room with a girl from Nablus named Zinat. Barely nineteen, Zinat had followed her six brothers into the military in order to earn a scholarship and pursue an engineering degree. When Amal asked what sort of engineering she was interested in, Zinat said, “Cars. Fast cars.”

Zinat kept a picture of her family taped above her bunk. A second photo showed Zinat and several other Lionesses gathered around the Persian war correspondent Christiane Amanpour, who’d done a special report on the women’s unit earlier this year. Zinat stood to Amanpour’s right, cradling a .50-caliber sniper rifle that was almost as big as she was. “Do you bring this weapon on patrol?” Amal asked.

“No, that was just for the photo,” Zinat said, sounding a bit wistful. “We were at the combat range and I talked the gunnery sergeant into letting me pose with it . . . If you’d like, I could probably take you over there for some practice shooting.” She raised an eyebrow. “They’ve got flamethrowers, too.”

“That sounds like fun,” Amal said, less interested in flamethrowers than in locating Salim. But perhaps this girl could help her with that. As for what she would do once she actually found her son . . . Well, Amal was still working on that. One step at a time.

Reveille for the troops was a muezzin’s call piped through the Watergate intercom system. After washing up, Amal followed Zinat to the top-floor lounge that served as the women’s prayer room. Attendance at prayer was voluntary, but it looked as though most of the Lionesses, save the few who were Christians or Jews, were there. The majority were Zinat’s age, but among them were a number of older career Marines.